New research suggests the human mind is surprisingly flexible when it comes to moral judgments.
An international team led by UCLA anthropology professor Daniel Fessler examined moral judgments in seven culturally diverse societies, from rural Papua New Guinea to urban California. The study found a consistent pattern: people generally judge actions such as lying, theft and assault as wrong, but they judge them less harshly when those acts occurred far away, long ago, or were endorsed by an authority figure.
“This troubling finding helps explain why a blind eye is often turned to atrocities that occur abroad or are sanctioned by influential individuals,” said Fessler, the study’s lead author.
The research, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, contrasted two ideas about human morality: whether people are moral universalists who apply the same standards regardless of context, or moral parochialists who relax judgments when the local stakes are lower.
“We did not find evidence of staunch universalism anywhere in our sample,” Fessler said. “It’s not just Americans who are complacent about events far away. This pattern appears across societies, suggesting a feature of how our minds are organized.”
Cross-cultural interviews
To avoid results driven by shared cultural assumptions, the researchers sampled both large-scale societies with state-based systems and small-scale, egalitarian or clan-based communities. Interviews took place in small communities in Ecuador, Bolivia, Fiji, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, in a village in Ukraine, and in two parts of California (treated together as one society for analysis).
Participants were presented with seven short vignettes involving wrongdoing and asked to rate the protagonist on a five-point moral scale: extremely bad, bad, neither good nor bad, good, and extremely good. Vignettes included a man stealing a stranger’s money, a man spreading a knowingly false rumor that a rival is a thief, and a man battering his wife without provocation. More than 95 percent of respondents placed these acts on the bad side of the scale when judged in the original context.
Next, participants were asked whether their evaluation would change if the same action had occurred far away, long ago, or if a local authority declared it “not bad.” In every society sampled, many people softened their initial condemnation—shifting from “extremely bad” to “bad,” and in some cases to “neither good nor bad.”
Fessler described this tendency as worrying. As temporal or spatial distance increases, people may be more open to seeing a clearly wrong act as less objectionable. “‘Not as bad’ may be all it takes for an atrocity to proceed unchecked when it happens far away,” he said.
Evolutionary logic: weighing costs and benefits
The authors argue that moral parochialism fits an evolutionary account of human social cognition. Condemning others can protect local norms and boost reputation, but costly behaviors—expressing outrage, intervening, or risking conflict—are more likely when the expected benefits outweigh the costs. Those benefits are typically local: defending immediate social relationships and signaling trustworthiness where it matters most.
“We should expect people to be most inclined to judge others when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs,” Fessler said. “If moral outrage functions to secure local social payoffs, then judgment mechanisms should be strongest for recent, nearby transgressions, and sensitive to what local authorities say.”
This perspective helps explain practical communication strategies used by organizations that try to generate concern about distant problems: by framing people in other places as “just like us,” communicators reduce psychological distance and make condemnation more likely. It also helps explain some contradictory effects of the internet: although digital media bring distant events into view, making them feel immediate, our minds still often process moral issues differently depending on perceived distance and authority cues.
The study was conducted by researchers from institutions including UCLA, Comenius University (Slovakia), Rutgers University, the University of British Columbia, UC Santa Barbara, the Australian National University, the University of Richmond, the University of Sheffield, Arizona State University, and the College of DuPage. Among the authors are Daniel M. T. Fessler, H. Clark Barrett, Colin Holbrook, Joseph Henrich, Matthew M. Gervais, Michael Gurven, Anne C. Pisor, and others.
Source: Alison Hewitt — UCLA
Original research: “Moral parochialism and contextual contingency across seven societies,” published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, online August 5, 2015. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.0907
Abstract (summary)
The paper tests the prediction that human moral judgment is tuned to local, recent events and to authority pronouncements—patterns consistent with evolutionary accounts in which moral condemnation yields fitness-related payoffs mainly within immediate social arenas. Across five small-scale and two large-scale societies, the study found robust evidence that people’s moral condemnation is stronger for nearby, recent transgressions and is reduced for actions that occurred far away, long ago, or were deemed acceptable by local authorities. These results support the idea of moral parochialism and contextual contingency as cross-cultural features of moral cognition.